Many companies consider their top executives critical to the smooth running of the organization and offer them an executive physical to make sure they’re in top shape. Because of how much companies depend on their information technology, the health of that infrastructure may be even more important to the company than its CEO’s cholesterol levels.

After all, a company will keep working if the CEO has a heart attack, but everything grinds to a halt when the computers are down. Improperly sized and poorly supported infrastructure can also affect the day-to-day operations of a business and its ability to expand and take advantage of new opportunities. For those reasons, every company should periodically subject its systems to the scrutiny of an infrastructure assessment, the equivalent of an executive physical for its infrastructure.

Assess More than Hardware

When you think of an infrastructure assessment, you probably think of servers, storage, and network bandwidth. To be sure, those components are important, and an infrastructure assessment should assess all the physical elements, including desktop and mobile clients, printers, scanners, and other devices.

But to get the most value from an infrastructure assessment, it should focus on more than just the hardware and capacity concerns. The evaluation needs to put the infrastructure in context, including the software it currently runs, anticipated growth, and the corporate culture in which the operations team functions.

The assessment needs to consider the age of legacy hardware, operating systems, and software applications, the expense of replacing them, the difficulty of replacing them, and whatever changes in staffing and policy the company will need in order to adapt to the new systems. Recommendations may also need to consider financial factors; recommendations that don’t match the budget capacity and can’t be acted on are useless.

Future goals are also important. Any recommended upgrades and replacement of systems must correlate to systems that are being developed and the company’s future plans. Scalability and flexibility are key.

Recommendations for Management

The recommendations to management need to include recommendations for management. To provide this, the infrastructure assessment needs to review the IT policies and procedures the organization follows, its change control procedures, the risks the technology infrastructure is exposed to, and the plans the company has for managing those risks. The company’s backup and disaster recovery plans should be reviewed, along with the security architecture, as part of evaluating the firm’s risk management.

Once the comprehensive infrastructure assessment is completed, the company’s management receives a full analysis of the current architecture, its status, the impact that obsolete technology and incomplete procedures have on the organization, along with recommendations for improvement. Given the recommendations, organizations can then develop an action plan for implementing the changes that will keep their system running and growing well into the future.

Request an Infrastructure Assessment

Ready to give your systems a thorough check-up? The Prescient Solutions team brings deep understanding of current technology to our infrastructure assessments and matches top-tier executive physicals for the thoroughness of the examination. With our assessment, you’ll get the guidance you need to maintain healthy infrastructure that keeps up with your business demands. Contact us now for your free assessment.